Model reference · open weights
Qwen3 Embedding is an open-weight embedding model from Qwen, available today on the AxForge serverless API, OpenAI-compatible and hosted in the EU.
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Summary of the Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | Qwen |
|---|---|
| Released | 2025-06-03 |
| Parameters | 596M |
| VRAM | 1.2 GB for the weights |
What it runs on
| Card | Runs | Memory |
|---|---|---|
| RTX 3060 12 GB | fits | 11.6 GB |
| RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB | fits | 15.4 GB |
| RTX 3090 24 GB | fits | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 4090 24 GB | fits | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 5090 32 GB | fits | 31.0 GB |
| L40S 48 GB | fits | 44.0 GB |
| A100 80 GB | fits | 78.2 GB |
| H100 80 GB | fits | 78.1 GB |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB | fits | 93.8 GB |
| DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified | fits | 107 GB |
| H200 141 GB | fits | 138 GB |
| B200 180 GB | fits | 176 GB |
Builds
| Build | Params | Precision | Weights | Smallest setup |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B (above) ↗ On the API | 0.6B | BF16 | 1.2 GB | RTX 3060 12 GB |
| Qwen3-Embedding-4B ↗ | 4.0B | BF16 | 8.0 GB | RTX 3060 12 GB |
| Qwen3-Embedding-8B ↗ | 7.6B | BF16 | 15.1 GB | RTX 4090 24 GB |
From the model card
The Qwen3 Embedding model series is the latest proprietary model of the Qwen family, specifically designed for text embedding and ranking tasks. Building upon the dense foundational models of the Qwen3 series, it provides a comprehensive range of text embeddings and reranking models in various sizes (0.6B, 4B, and 8B). This series inherits the exceptional multilingual capabilities, long-text understanding, and reasoning skills of its foundational model. The Qwen3 Embedding series represents significant advancements in multiple text embedding and ranking tasks, including text retrieval, code retrieval, text classification, text clustering, and bitext mining.
Exceptional Versatility: The embedding model has achieved state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of downstream application evaluations. The 8B size embedding model ranks No.1 in the MTEB multilingual leaderboard (as of June 5, 2025, score 70.58), while the reranking model excels in various text retrieval scenarios.
Multilingual Capability: The Qwen3 Embedding series offer support for over 100 languages, thanks to the multilingual capabilites of Qwen3 models. This includes various programming languages, and provides robust multilingual, cross-lingual, and code retrieval capabilities.
Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B has the following features:
For more details, including benchmark evaluation, hardware requirements, and inference performance, please refer to our blog, GitHub.
| Model Type | Models | Size | Layers | Sequence Length | Embedding Dimension | MRL Support | Instruction Aware |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Text Embedding | Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B | 0.6B | 28 | 32K | 1024 | Yes | Yes |
| Text Embedding | Qwen3-Embedding-4B | 4B | 36 | 32K | 2560 | Yes | Yes |
| Text Embedding | Qwen3-Embedding-8B | 8B | 36 | 32K | 4096 | Yes | Yes |
| Text Reranking | Qwen3-Reranker-0.6B | 0.6B | 28 | 32K | - | - | Yes |
| Text Reranking | Qwen3-Reranker-4B | 4B | 36 | 32K | - | - | Yes |
| Text Reranking | Qwen3-Reranker-8B | 8B | 36 | 32K | - | - | Yes |
Note:
MRL Supportindicates whether the embedding model supports custom dimensions for the final embedding.Instruction Awarenotes whether the embedding or reranking model supports customizing the input instruction according to different tasks.- Our evaluation indicates that, for most downstream tasks, using instructions (instruct) typically yields an improvement of 1% to 5% compared to not using them. Therefore, we recommend that developers create tailored instructions specific to their tasks and scenarios. In multilingual contexts, we also advise users to write their instructions in English, as most instructions utilized during the model training process were originally written in English.
With Transformers versions earlier than 4.51.0, you may encounter the following error:
KeyError: 'qwen3'
# Requires transformers>=4.51.0
# Requires sentence-transformers>=2.7.0
from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
# Load the model
model = SentenceTransformer("Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B")
# We recommend enabling flash_attention_2 for better acceleration and memory saving,
# together with setting `padding_side` to "left":
# model = SentenceTransformer(
# "Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B",
# model_kwargs={"attn_implementation": "flash_attention_2", "device_map": "auto"},
# tokenizer_kwargs={"padding_side": "left"},
# )
# The queries and documents to embed
queries = [
"What is the capital of China?",
"Explain gravity",
]
documents = [
"The capital of China is Beijing.",
"Gravity is a force that attracts two bodies towards each other. It gives weight to physical objects and is responsible for the movement of planets around the sun.",
]
# Encode the queries and documents. Note that queries benefit from using a prompt
# Here we use the prompt called "query" stored under `model.prompts`, but you can
# also pass your own prompt via the `prompt` argument
query_embeddings = model.encode(queries, prompt_name="query")
document_embeddings = model.encode(documents)
# Compute the (cosine) similarity between the query and document embeddings
similarity = model.similarity(query_embeddings, document_embeddings)
print(similarity)
# tensor([Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.
Using it via the API
Qwen3 Embedding answers on the OpenAI-compatible API today as qwen3-embed, with the same
base URL and keys as every other model.
# your API key, from API Keys
export AXFORGE_API_KEY="YOUR_KEY"
curl https://api.axforge.ai/v1/embeddings \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $AXFORGE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"qwen3-embed","input":"text to embed"}'
# your API key, from API Keys
$env:AXFORGE_API_KEY = "YOUR_KEY"
$call = @{
Method = "Post"
Uri = "https://api.axforge.ai/v1/embeddings"
Headers = @{ Authorization = "Bearer $env:AXFORGE_API_KEY" }
ContentType = "application/json"
Body = '{"model":"qwen3-embed","input":"text to embed"}'
}
(Invoke-RestMethod @call).data[0].embedding.Count
REM your API key, from API Keys
set AXFORGE_API_KEY=YOUR_KEY
curl.exe https://api.axforge.ai/v1/embeddings ^
-H "Authorization: Bearer %AXFORGE_API_KEY%" ^
-H "Content-Type: application/json" ^
-d "{\"model\":\"qwen3-embed\",\"input\":\"text to embed\"}"
Create an account and your API key is available in the console. 3M free tokens every 30 days with every new account.